The Impact of Delayed Analysis on Glucose Levels of Blood Samples

In a hospital setting, glucose is often measured from venous blood in the clinical laboratory. However, laboratory glucose measurements are typically not available in real time. In practice, turnaround times for laboratory measurements can be minutes to hours. This analysis assesses the impact of turn-around time on the effective clinical accuracy of laboratory measurements. Fasting Blood samples was collected from 50-apparently healthy subjects of Federal college of medical laboratory Sciences, Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria. The blood samples were collected into a plain tubes and fluoride oxalate tubes for serum and plasma respectively. Blood glucose estimations was analyzed using Oxidase--Peroxidase method and the Statistical data were analyzed using statistical product and service solution (SPSS) or IBM SPSS version 25.0.The mean ±SD of plasma and serum at baseline of 0-hour,2- hours,4-hours,6-hours,24-hours,48- hours and 72-hours were obtained as 4.63±0.660,4.72±0.368, 5.24±0.440,5.08±0.379,4.77±0.383,4.72±0.442,4.28±0.587 and 4.54± 0.650,4.68±0.655, 4.52±0.535,4.80± 0.653, 4.50±0.631,4.04±1.052,3.77±0.981 for plasma and serum respectively. P≤0.05 was regarded as statistically significant. Finally, the novelty of our study is assessing the effects of time variations on blood glucose concentrations, with this study, we have been able to establish that, there is no stability of glucose concentrations if the collected samples are kept beyond reasonable time of beyond 4 - 6 hours before the analysis is carried out. This report is also in agreement with the research reports of Ambade.